But the U.N. investigative report by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis was anything but “meticulous.” Indeed, it read more like a compilation of circumstantial evidence and conspiracy theories than a dispassionate pursuit of the truth.
As a wealthy businessman with close ties to the Saudi monarchy, Hariri had many enemies who might have wanted him dead for his business or political dealings. The Syrians were not alone in having a motive to eliminate Hariri.
Indeed, after the assassination, a videotape was delivered to al-Jazeera television on which a Lebanese youth, Ahmad Abu Adass, claimed to have carried out the suicide bombing on behalf of Islamic militants angered by Hariri’s work on behalf of “the agent of the infidels” in Saudi Arabia.
However, the initial U.N. report relied on two witnesses – Zuhair Ibn Muhammad Said Saddik and Hussam Taher Hussam – to dismiss the videotape as part of a disinformation campaign designed to deflect suspicion from Syria.
Investigator Mehlis then spun a narrative of a Syrian conspiracy to kill Hariri. The findings meshed well with the Bush administration’s goals and the desire of anti-Syrian Lebanese politicians to isolate Syrian sympathizers and force a full withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanese territory.
Four pro-Syrian Lebanese security officials were jailed on suspicion of involvement in Hariri's murder. Everything was falling neatly into place.
As a new U.S. press hysteria built over another case of pure evil traced to the doorstep of an American adversary, the holes in the U.N. report were mostly ignored. At Consortiumnews.com, we produced one of the few critical examinations of what had the looks of another rush to judgment. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Dangerously Incomplete Hariri Report.”]
A Case Crumbles
Much like the Iraqi WMD evidence, the Hariri case soon began to crumble.
One witness, Saddik, was identified by the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel as a swindler who boasted about becoming “a millionaire” from his Hariri testimony. The other one, Hussam, recanted his testimony about Syrian involvement, saying he lied to the Mehlis investigation after being kidnapped, tortured and offered $1.3 million by Lebanese officials.
Mehlis soon stepped down, as even the New York Times acknowledged that the conflicting accusations had given the investigation the feel of “a fictional spy thriller.” [NYT, Dec. 7, 2005]
Mehlis’s replacements backed away from his Syrian accusations. The next chief investigator, Serge Brammertz of Belgium, began entertaining other investigative leads, examining a variety of possible motives and a number of potential perpetrators.
“Given the many different positions occupied by Mr. Hariri, and his wide range of public and private-sector activities, the [U.N.] commission was investigating a number of different motives, including political motivations, personal vendettas, financial circumstances and extremist ideologies, or any combination of those motivations,” Brammertz’s interim report said, according to a U.N. statement on June 14, 2006.
In other words, Brammertz had dumped Mehlis’s single-minded theory that had pinned the blame on senior Syrian security officials. Though Syria’s freewheeling intelligence services and their Lebanese cohorts remained on everyone’s suspect list, Brammertz adopted a far less confrontational and accusatory tone toward Syria.
Syria had kind words for Brammertz’s report, too. Fayssal Mekdad, Syria’s Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs, praised “its objectivity and professionalism” and said the investigators “had begun to uncover the truth” after Mehlis departed.
Still, the U.S. news media, which had played the initial Mehlis accusations against Syria as front-page news, barely mentioned the shift in the U.N. probe.
Virtually nothing appeared in the U.S. news media that would alert the American people to the fact that the distinct impression they got in 2005 – that the Syrian government had engineered a terrorist bombing in Beirut – was now a whole lot fuzzier.
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